Henry Royce Institute National Conference

Event details

• Date: September 3 - September 4, 2025
• Location: Manchester

More info
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Join the Henry Royce Institute for their flagship national conference from 3-4 September 2025 at the Nancy Rothwell Building in Manchester.

Unlocking UK economic growth through materials innovation.

Discover the transformative power of materials innovation at their biennial two-day event. The conference will delve into how collaboration between industry and academia is revolutionising materials innovation and driving advancements across sectors.

Conference Highlights

The 2025 conference will feature expert speakers from industry, academia, government, and research funding councils. The event will build on the recently launched National Materials Innovation Strategy’s core themes, including:

• Energy Solutions: Efficient and sustainable energy generation, storage, transmission, and usage to achieve net-zero goals. “Rising to the net-zero challenge.”
• Future Healthcare: Advancing beyond biocompatibility to deliver active medical solutions.
• Structural Innovations: Strengthening infrastructure, the built environment, and transport systems.
• Advanced Surface Technologies: Enhancing product functionality, performance, and longevity.
• Next-Generation Electronics and Sensors: Driving high-performance connectivity for the future.
• Consumer Products and Polymers: Innovating for greener, sustainable packaging and products.

In addition, the conference will address essential cross-sector topics:

• Materials 4.0  –  looking at how transitioning to greater use of digital tools will accelerate materials innovation – drastically reducing the lead time to commercialisation
• Sustainability and the Circular Economy – exploring how we create a more resilient economy through materials innovation that has “sustainable by design” at the heart of our supply chains
• Translation and Manufacturing – too often in the UK, groundbreaking materials research is scaled and commercialised abroad, we’ll address the need to secure access to appropriate financing and better coordination across public and private sector funding streams.
• Skills Development – the materials sector faces higher-than-average skills shortages and must rise to the challenge of identifying and closing current and future materials skills gaps, particularly at in the highest priority cross-cutting areas of Materials 4.0 and sustainability
• Policy, Regulations, and Standards – our regulatory environment needs to deliver a supportive, flexible ecosystem for materials innovation by providing clarity, consistency and incentives. The materials community must collaborate closely with policymakers to facilitate  these outcomes

For more information visit the conference website.